Chana
}} TLDR version: Once a failed padawan, now fresh out of decades in carbon-freeze, and force-blind until further notice. Chana is a fighter-jock these days, and a good one. Also occasionally a scoundrel. She's given up on the Force ever coming back to her. There comes a time when you have to go on living. Long version: It is said that the birth of a virgance in the Force causes tempests that ripple through the galaxy. It is said that when those tempests light upon an unborn Force sensitive child, they alter her ability to use the Force forever. They have not existed since the passage of the last Virgance, far back in the reaches of time, where history and myth are no longer separate, and the stories have been told and retold, but always, one name remains. Such children are called the Ko. The bringers of chaos. And then, Anakin Skywalker was born. With him, the Ko returned. Born in 41.5BBY, Chanera Ruai Thorn was notably Force sensitive by the time she would walk. She entered into Jedi training when she was 6, in the waning days of the Old Republic, under master Shanthius Torr. She barely remembers her parents. Her training did not go well. To Chana, the Force doesn't have a light side or a dark side. It just is. She proved completely incapable of learning certain basic Jedi skills, such as the famous Jedi Mind Trick. Telekinesis was easy enough. Lifting a swoop was hardly a challenge. Putting it back down without crushing it, by contrast, was always touch and go. And so on. Chana learned Shii-Cho well enough. She developed a passing familiarity with six of the seven other Jedi lightsaber forms (no-one in their right mind would teach her vaapad), and was just starting to make serious inroads into a Djem So and Makashi mashup style of her own when everything fell apart. As the Old Republic began to unwind during the clone wars, even partly trained, semi-competent padawans like Chana were pressed into service. Her master led her into a fight with gangsters tied to the Separatists on an outer rim planet called Wolloon. There he would test her. There, he would see if the myths were true. It was a disaster. An underling was questioned. Torr ordered Chana to use the Jedi Mind Trick, once and for all, to extract tactical information from the underling. The underling's skull caved in instead. When his heart stopped, it set off the alarms. The two had to fight their way out, leaving Torr wounded, and the connection to the Separatists irretreviably lost. Torr resolved to take Chana back to Coriscant and have her chloistered permanently, a failure of his teaching and her ability to learn. He died of his injuries while the ship was in hyperspace. Chana had been raised to be a Jedi. Strong bonds were to be avoided, and yet she loved Torr in her way. His death was crushing. Even if he had lived, it was clear their relationship had reached its end. Broken hearted, Chana searched her feelings for the right thing to do. Should she obey her master's final wish, even though it would cost her freedom and possibly her life in those tense days, or should she escape? Find her own way? Do something worthwhile with the skills she did have? She knew this: she had no desire to be cloistered. She was just entering the flower of young adulthood, when, had things gone better, she might have tested and been knighted and given the freedom she so desperately craved to go do things. Make a difference. To go have relationships that were neither particularly deep nor emotional, and thus not proscribed by Jedi tradition. 19 is a frisky age. She stood from her meditation, took her master's lightsaber from his side, and packed her things. Unable to unlock the ship's navigation computer from Coruscant, Chana climbed into an escape pod and bailed out. One of those times in Chana's life where a little forethought, like checking her current location a little more carefully, might have saved Chana some trouble. The navacomputer said they were only 22 light years from Tatooine. Maybe an hour in hyperspace, if that. If only the escape pod had hyperdrive. The escape pod dutifully set course for Tatooine, and informed Chana that flight time would exceed consumables by approximately 40 years. It recommended the carbon freeze option, and would try to maintain power long enough to get her there. While occasionally impulsive, Chana was in no way stupid. She took the machine's advice. For its part, the escape pod turned off all non-essential systems, confining its power usage to inertial navigation and hazard avoidance. The beacon by which anyone might find the pod in space didn't seem essential. Chana had told the machine where to go, after all. Four decades passed. The Old Republic fell. The Jedi were hunted to near extinction, and knowledge of the Force all but lost. The galaxy convulsed in civil war. The last of the old Jedi order passed within a few lightyears of her pod time and again, unaware. Death Stars were built, The Rebellion blew them up. The Empire fell and was reborn. All these things happened while Chanera Thorn was in carbon sleep In due time, the pod's sensors detected that it was approaching its long-awaited destination. Tatooine loomed in its sensors, and through the window to the airless pod and its frozen occupant. The pod did what it could to get Chana down safely. It landed at least as well as R2-D2's famous headlong crash into the Dune Sea. Well enough. With the very last of its reserve energy, the faithful machine fired up the defrosting systems, hoping against hope that they were still in good enough condition to revive Chana, and that she might have somehow survived the long, cold sleep. The pod would never know the answer. Its energy all but depleted, it shut its own brain down that the carbon freeze unit might have enough energy to revive Chanera. It worked. Chanera was alive. Unlike many, she didn't have the usual side effect of carbonite induced blindness. What happened to her was much worse. Chana wasn't the same when she emerged from carbon freeze. The decades frozen, perhaps coupled with the turmoil in the Force of those years - the lives and death(s) of Palpatine and the Virgance - had conspired to take her gift in the Force away. Chanera Thorn was a Force Sensitive. She isn't anymore. Adrift in the New Republic era, cut off from the Force, she's begun her new life as a nomad, roaming from planet to planet doing odd jobs and trying to stay out of trouble. She wields a blaster these days, and she's pretty good with it. She has some repair skills. She's become useful. The Angry Rancor was her first home, under the tutlige of Ka'una, who went a long way into acclimitizing the lost former-padawan into the new era, and the way normal people in the galaxy approach their lives. And then along came Johanna. The Jedi. She swept Chana into orbit around her as effortlessly as the black hole at Knosis picks up stray ships. They understand each other in ways civilians and non-force sensitives simply cannot. Johanna understands the parts that Chana is simply missing, and she understands what Chana has lost. Thte fact that Chana is an entirely competent fighter pilot, even without the Force, has not been a bad thing either. Chana, for her part, has tried to fit in. Some days she almost can. But deep in her bag, under her tools and her extra socks and whatnot lie the only offerings to hope that she has: two broken lightsabers - her own,wrecked by carbon freezing, and her master's, damaged in the fight and by decades in hard vacuum. She carries them, even though the hope is gone. Mostly. Category:Humans Category:Independent pilots Category:Independent Characters Category:Corellians